The US is in need of wit, not 'unity'

Reading Ambrose Bierce in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump

It seems to me that the only remark worth making when one considers all the finger-pointing and head-scratching that has gone on in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is that it has been, on the whole, of a profoundly banal character.

Naturally there are the conspiracy theorists, who although sometimes amusing, usually prove very quickly either bad, mad, or sad. Then there are those who watch them; the strait-laced and the wet, who note, assiduously, that the political climate is a ‘deeply polarised’ one, marked by ‘heightened emotions’ and a divergence on ‘facts’.

Almost as anodyne as these dull spectators are the ‘thinkers’; ready and willing to take up the tired talking points of the day, in our case, ‘misinformation’, ‘free speech’, and ‘cancel culture’, all of which arise when we turn to the question of what one is to make of the charge of ‘inflammatory rhetoric’. For it is ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ that both the left and the right agree on, and it has been the term that in the wake of the attack each has accused its opponent of engaging in.

First there is the question of what ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ is or means. It is not as elusive as the new ‘misinformation’ and ‘cancel culture’ but I find it an odd term nonetheless and a notion probably best left to the lawyers. There is no entry for either word in Ambrose Bierce’s 1906 Devil’s Dictionary. He does, however, give definitions of; Agitator, n. ‘A statesman who shakes the fruit trees of his neighbors—to dislodge the worms’, Persuasion, n. ‘A species of hypnotism in which the oral suggestion takes the hindering form of argument or appeal’, and Oratory, n. ‘A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding’… ‘A tyranny tempered by stenography.’ In our age, the tyranny of oratory is of course not tempered but exacerbated by stenography, now known as X.

But I am reading Bierce because it was Bierce, and the assassination of the 25th President of the United States, William McKinley, that came to my mind when I sat down to think about our historic event.

Bierce, McKinley, Hearst

Ambrose Bierce was a short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran whose Devil’s Dictionary has been named one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" but who is probably best known for being the author of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. American readers will be familiar with him, but if you haven’t heard of Bierce you can read his impressive wikipedia page here where he is at once considered a bedfellow of Juvenal, Voltaire and Swift; ranked alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P Lovecraft, and his influence on Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane duly noted.

It is his journalism I am interested in here, however, and in 1900 Bierce was writing for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. Immortalised by Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, Hearst’s real start in publishing was the San Francisco Examiner, which he took over in 1887, and immediately sought out Ambrose Bierce to join as chief editorial writer. Bierce wrote later of their first meeting:

One day as I lounged in my lodging there was a gentle, hesitating rap at the door, and opening it, I found a young man, the youngest young man, it seemed to me, that I had ever confronted. His appearance, his attitude, his manner, his entire personality suggested extreme indifference. I did not ask him in...if my memory is not at fault I merely said: "Well," and awaited the result.

"I am from the San Francisco Examiner," he explained in a voice like the fragrance of violets made audible, and backed a little away. 

 "O," I said, "you come from Mr. Hearst."

 Then that unearthly child lifted its blue eyes and cooed: "I am Mr. Hearst."

It was the beginning of a very successful, if eccentric, partnership and after great success with the San Francisco Examiner Hearst set his sights on “a nation-spanning, multi-paper news operation” something he knew was “impossible without a triumph in New York." In 1895 he bought the failing penny press the New York Morning Journal, took with him his best writers—the best of all, or at least the favourite, being Bierce—from the San Francisco Examiner, and entered into a head-to-head circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer, owner and publisher of the New York World. Hearst apparently also stole Pulitzer’s cartoonist Richard F. Outcault, as well as his entire Sunday staff. This early hoot of a period, which gave rise to a sensationalist style of popular journalism derided as ‘yellow’, is described in a manner almost as colourful as the man himself in this section of his 1951 Time obituary:

The lanky (6 ft. 1 in., 155 Ibs.), blond-mustached 23-year-old took over the Examiner on March 4, 1887. He subtitled his little sheet "Monarch of the Dailies," and set out, as one editor put it, "to arouse the 'gee whiz!' emotion." The Examiner's boss rushed special trains to cover out-of-town fires, ran up enormous cable tolls. He wrote boob-catching headlines like A SUNDAY SUICIDE OF A LOVESICK LOAFER. On the premise that "there is no substitute for circulation," he spent his father's money like a drunken prospector—then made it back, as circulation multiplied.

He gathered around him a brilliant, erratic crew of staffers and contributors (Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Edwin Markham, Homer Davenport, et al.), entertained them by dancing jigs in the office, striding through the streets with a cane that whistled, and in more corruptive ways. He was great fun to work for; after a hard day in the newsroom he liked to gather the staff at his big house for lavish parties complete [said horrified gossips] with "abandoned dancing girls." After his father died (1891), someone complained to his mother that Willie was wasting the family fortune away at $1 million a year. "Too bad," said Phoebe Hearst sweetly. "Then he'll only last 30 years."

The Yellow Kid. By 1895, having perfected his techniques of carnival journalism, he felt ready to conquer Manhattan. He had $7½-million with him, and he was ready to bet it all on his new paper, the Morning Journal. One day Hearst rocked Pulitzer by buying away the entire Sunday staff of his World—including Morrill Goddard, who was to steer the blatant American Weekly toward the world's biggest circulation with such stories as NAILED HER FATHER'S HEAD TO THE FRONT DOOR. From then on W.R.'s Journal outplayed the World at its own scare-head-hunting game. It was the Hearst-Pulitzer tug-of-war over Richard Outcault's forlorn Yellow Kid that brought on the day of the colored comic strip, and gave "yellow journalism" its name.

It was in this context, then, that on February 4, 1900 Ambrose Bierce closed his New York Evening Journal column with this quatrain:

The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West.
Good reason: it is speeding here [to Washington]
To stretch McKinley on his bier.

Four days earlier William Gobel, the Governor of Kentucky, was shot by an assassin. Gobel’s assassination is notable in that it happened immediately after, or really in the moments that he won a very hotly contested election. As he approached the steps to the Capitol an unidentified assailant fired shots. He was sworn in as Governor on his deathbed and served only 4 days.

Bierce’s column was by his, and Hearst’s, standards innocuous. He considered the assassination “a particularly perilous precedent if unpunished” and later stated that he was warning of the dangers posed by “foreign elements” or those who espoused the new, foreign, philosophy of anarchism and its most publicised product, assassination. The doggerel, Bierce asserted, was simply him emphasising that anarchism was a clear and present danger. And, indeed, it was. Twenty months after the lines were published President William McKinley was fatally shot by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz.

It is almost certain that Czolgosz did not read Bierce’s quatrain, Hearst’s biographer states he was unable to read English, however (false) rumours flew that a clipping of Bierce’s poem had been found in the assassin’s pocket and Hearst found himself in “a storm-centre”. Whenever a Hearst newspaper was published there were “thunders of popular indignation”. The Sun, another newspaper magnate Frank Munsey’s ostensibly more staid rag, led the assault and Bierce later wrote that “The verses, variously garbled but mostly made into an editorial, or a news dispatch with a Washington date-line but usually no date, were published all over the country as evidence of Mr. Hearst’s [supposed] complicity in the crime.”

Hearst was of course, strictly speaking, innocent, however he did lead a protracted campaign against McKinley, promoting William Jennings Bryan for president in 1986 and 1900. Then there was the issue that on April 10, 1901, The Journal had published an unsigned editorial written by Arthur Brisbane, where he wrote “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” Hearst claimed, very probably truthfully, that it had been published without his knowledge and he pulled Brisbane’s column after it ran a first edition. In the wake of President McKinley’s assassination, however, and set alongside Bierce’s quatrain with its line “To stretch McKinley on his bier” retrospective qualifications fell on deaf ears and the damage was enough for the larger than life Hearst to retreat, stunned. According to biographer David Nasaw, “for the first time in his life, Hearst was forced onto the defensive”. He renamed the New York Journal the New York Journal-American, then dropped “Journal” from the nameplate altogether, perhaps in an attempt to reaffirm the newspaper’s patriotism.

In any case, ‘yellow journalism’, or rather the Hearst-Pulitzer war, and the Gilded age, was coming to an end and soon gave way to, amongst other things, ‘muckraking’. One of the classic books on the history of mass media in the United States, The Press and America (well worth a read for those interested in such matters, particularly on the Spanish-American war, and available here) charts the developments well, noting that Pulitzer withdrew the World from competition in sensationalism at the turn of the century when he installed Frank I. Cobb. By Pulitzer’s death in 1911, Hearst’s American had lost significant ground against the competition of the World, the Times, the Tribune, and the Herald and Hearst notably turned to comics, introducing the nation’s first full daily comics page in 1912.

‘Yellow Journalism’ now?

What are we to make, then, of this tale and today? Are we living in our own, distinctive, age of ‘yellow journalism’? Marked by ‘fake news’, an increasingly partisan ‘mainstream media’, and bad behaviour on both sides?

I think that any attempt to draw a parallel between the sensationalist newspapers of America’s Gilded Age and ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and our current political climate would turn out superficial at best, not least because of the internet.

I note that some hacks have tried it, notably Jeet Heer for The New Republic in 2016. Heer argued, or rather stated, that Donald Trump was engaging in “incitement to harm Hillary Clinton” and that the precursor of this was Yellow Journalism. “Donald Trump, Gutter Journalist” the editorial declared. Heer revisited the favourable comparison between Yellow Journalism and modern America in 2017, however, this time, he perhaps had our ‘post-truth’ world too front of mind. Heer wrote that:

“McKinley was assassinated the following year, leading another Hearst writer, Arthur Brisbane to write an unsigned editorial, ‘If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done’”.

Heer is wrong. Brisbane wrote his editorial five months before McKinley was assassinated not after the event. It was not a ‘celebration’ of the murder, which is what Heer, whether intentionally or not, implies. Like Bierce, who penned his doggerel twenty months before the president was killed, Brisbane’s words (although far more invective than Bierce’s) may be fairly taken as a reflection on the fact that, as Bierce stated, anarchism and its most publicised product, assassination, was a clear and present danger. Or of Brisbane we might ask: is it that institutions themselves have fallen victim to a tyrannous ‘anarchy’ and so by some dark logic are necessarily doomed to fall on their own sword, or rather, a sword of their own making?

I am of course equivocating, and being a bit facetious, Brisbane wrote ‘killing must be done’. But that Heer and others are so eager to cry ‘incitement’ I find sensationalist itself, and I note that The New Republic are not only rejecting arguments that the left contributed to the attempt on Trump’s life but are doubling down on their line that Trump remains the biggest threat to democracy in this country writing that “He will continue to encourage political violence in service of his political project, which is built on hatred and retribution”.

This is claptrap, and there was claptrap in late 19th century America, too, but there was also wit. Bierce’s columns were marked by a particularly sharp wit, but he also wrote on the subject itself, most definitively in a essay ‘Wit and Humor’. Lamenting that barely anyone, most of all writers, know or recognise the difference between the two, Bierce tells us:

“I was once asked by a rather famous author why we laugh at wit. I replied: “We don’t — at least those of us who understand it do not.” Wit may make us smile, or make us wince, but laughter — that is the cheaper price that we pay for an inferior entertainment, namely, humor. There are persons who will laugh at anything at which they think they are expected to laugh. Having been taught that anything funny is witty, these benighted persons naturally think that anything witty is funny.

Who but a clown would laugh at the maxims of Rochefoucauld, which are as witty as anything written? Take, for example, this hackneyed epigram: “There is something in the misfortunes of our friends which we find not entirely displeasing” — I translate from memory. It is an indictment of the whole human race; not altogether true and therefore not altogether dull, with just enough of audacity to startle and just enough of paradox to charm, profoundly wise, as bleak as steel — a piece of ideal wit, as admirable as a well cut grave or the headsman’s precision of stroke, and about as funny.

Take Rabelais’ saying that an empty stomach has no ears. How pitilessly it displays the primitive beast alurk in us all and moved to activity by our elemental disorders, such as the daily stress of hunger! Who could laugh at the horrible disclosure, yet who forbear to smile approval of the deftness with which the animal is unjungled?

In a matter of this kind it is easier to illustrate than to define. Humor [(which is not inconsistent with pathos, so nearly allied are laughter and tears) is Charles Dickens; wit is Alexander Pope. Humor is Dogberry; wit is Mercutio. Humor is “Artemus Ward,” “John Phoenix,” “Josh Billings,” “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Orpheus C. ‘Kerr,” “Bill” Nye, “Mark Twain” — their name is legion; for wit we must brave the perils of the deep: it is “made in France” and hardly bears transportation. Nearly all Americans are humorous; “if any are born witty, Heaven help them to emigrate! You shall not meet an American and talk with him two minutes but he will say something humorous; in ten days he will say nothing witty; and if he did, your own, O most witty of all possible readers, would be the only ear that would give it recognition. Humor is tolerant, tender; its ridicule caresses. Wit stabs, begs pardon — and turns the weapon in the wound. Humor is a sweet wine, wit a dry; we know which is preferred by the connoisseur.

[…] My conviction is that while wit is a universal tongue (which few, however, can speak) humor is everywhere a patois not “understanded of the people” over the province border. The best part of it — its “essential spirit and uncarnate self,” is indigenous, and will not flourish in a foreign soil. The humor of one race is in some degree unintelligible to another race, and even in transit between two branches of the same race loses something of its flavor.”

If we take Bierce’s conviction that ‘wit is a universal tongue’, and my contention that these days it is scarce—in fact, I think we are suffering from a dearth of wit—one may conclude that we are a people who have lost the ability to grasp the universal. That is itself, however, now a banal platitude, and one that we have seen repeated most by the ‘thinkers’ who take up the tired talking points of the day. That we have lost the ability to articulate and express the universal; to concern ourselves with manner, style, and wit, is rather the problem at hand, and while there is no doubt that banal ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ begets banal commentary, I contend that it need not necessarily do so.

LS

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